Owners and managers of commercial establishments know that providing excellent customer service is a key factor for success. Correspondingly, customers who receive great customer service return to commercial establishments and spend more money. To improve individualized customer service, businesses have used customer profile information to cater to the personal tastes of their customers. For example, businesses have developed loyalty programs or preferred customer programs to offer benefits to loyal customers, such as discounts, free products and amenities. Often, customers realize the benefits of such programs by swiping a card with a magnetic strip through a magnetic card reader to identify themselves. The identification is then used to access the customer's profile on the business' computer system, before a chosen benefit is applied.
The customer profile is a collection of data that describes the likes, dislikes, tastes and preferences of a customer. Sometimes customers provide this information to businesses. Sometime businesses accumulate data through purchases and other customer activity and build a customer profile. Other times the customer is invited to enroll in a loyalty program or some other promotional program, and, as a part of the enrollment program, the customer provides profile data to the establishment. As a result, many customers have multiple profiles residing on the computer systems of multiple businesses and those businesses have control over the data. This decentralization of data results in inconsistencies and errors across a consumer's multiple profiles and makes updating records a burdensome task. With a customer's several user profiles spread across multiple computers, it is up to the customer to maintain consistency in the profile data. For example, if one changes one's telephone number, multiple establishments must be notified of the new telephone number. This method is cumbersome and error prone. Additionally, as a customer's profile data is placed on more computer systems, more people have access to a customer's personal information.
A problem associated with this system of customer profile use and management is that it can be cumbersome for a consumer. For example, as described, a frequent traveler may have multiple profiles across multiple hotel chains. After a long trip, a traveler will find himself or herself standing in line at the front desk of a hotel, waiting for the clerk. Then, after waiting, the traveler will hand the clerk one of many cards with magnetic strips that the traveler has and wait for the clerk to access the hotel's computers before the clerk might know anything about the customer and be able to offer any benefits and check in a loyal customer. Moreover, because of the possible errors in the hotel's profile, the benefits may not be suitable. Worse yet, a traveler who forget his or her card will have to wait even longer before getting benefits and checking in. The annoyances caused by this scenario not only apply to travelers checking into hotels, they apply to all situations where one may try to realize the benefits of using user profile data.
The widespread use of mobile electronic devices, such as mobile phones, iPads™, tablet PCs and laptop computers provides a solution to the aforementioned problems because they provide the ability for a consumer to communicate with an establishment a suitable time before arriving and to store his or her own profile data on his or her own mobile electronic device. Rather than the frequent traveler arriving at a hotel after a long trip and having to wait in line, hand a clerk a card or verbally provide information, and wait some more before being recognized and treated personally, when the traveler is within a predefined range of the hotel, the traveler may use a mobile electronic device to communicate automatically with a like device at the hotel and to provide arrival and profile information, including a picture. Thus, hotel personnel will be able to check in the customer and arrange benefits before the customer arrives. Once the customer arrives, a hotel clerk can simply hand the traveler a key and state which benefits already have been arranged. The customer will feel important and well attended, and the hotel will provide the best imaginable service. This scenario may be replicated for any type establishment offering products and services to consumers. When the customer leaves the specified geographic area or issues a command to disconnect, the customer's information will be removed from the establishment's electronic devices.
Although the prior art has involved profile matching to customize and direct information to an end user and has also involved using location and profile information to customize material sent to an end user, these systems and methods have involved using profile data to select a subset of material to target to an end user from a larger collection of material. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,754,939, issued to Herz, et al., for “System for Generation of User Profiles for a System for Customized Electronic Identification of Desirable Objects” relates to identifying objects such as news articles in an electronic media environment by automatically constructing a “target profile” for each such object based on characteristics such as number of occurrences of particular words and by constructing a “target profile interest summary” for each user that describes a user's interests. The system then compares the target profiles with the target profile interest summaries to create a rank ordered listing of objects most desirable to a particular user. The target profile interest summaries are encrypted to ensure privacy and to give the user control over third party access to user profile information. As another example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,571,279, issued to Herz, et al., for “Location Enhanced Information Delivery System” uses profile information and current location information to transmit customized information to recipients who are local to an information delivery system, such as directing relevant coupons to customers who are near a store or restaurant. As a further example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,441,203, issued to Othmer, et al., for “Interactive User Interface Presentation Attributes for Location-Based Content” provides an electronic ticker service that customizes content transmitted to an end user based on that user's geographic location and attributes entered during a registration process. All of the prior art just referenced involves extracting information from a large data store based on an end user's profile and providing the user with the customized information, and some of this prior art further customizes the information based on the end user's location.
A service offered by Euclid Dynamics uses the unique identifier on a smart phone to gather statistics about customers without accessing personal data. The product can tell whether a certain user has entered the store or its vicinity and how many times, although the identity of the user remains unknown. The product can tell who passes a store and who stops to look in the window. While this system may be useful to store owners, it cannot be used to provide personalized service because the identification mechanism only uses the smart phone's digital identification data.
A product offered at www.guestbridge.com allows a customer to carry a card associated with a particular business that uses RFID technology to alert an establishment that the customer is near the premises. This allows personnel at the business to know that a particular customer is about to arrive. Thus, a customer can be recognized as soon as he or she enters and provided with individualized service. This product, however, is limited. Customers who patronize several different businesses will find themselves having to carry several cards. User profile information will exist in several places under the control of third parties, leading to inconsistent and unsecure profiles for a single person. Updating profiles can be cumbersome. Additionally, this product has a very limited range, leaving the business owner very little flexibility in the time available to prepare for a customer's arrival.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system where a single user profile exists for each customer that is securely controlled by that customer, that is transmitted to a business establishment when the user enters a defined geographic area to provide a virtual presence of the customer, that allows the business establishment enough time to prepare for the customer's arrival, and that removes the user profile from all devices except for the customer's mobile electronic device. This can be accomplished by creating and storing a user profile on a customer's mobile electronic device, such as a smart phone, and broadcasting location information and a unique identifier to a server that monitors whether the user has entered a defined geographic area. Once the user enters the defined geographic area, the mobile electronic device sends the user profile through the server to the screen buffers of electronic devices at the business establishment where the customer is going. Thus, a business may receive information that a customer is going to arrive with appropriate time to prepare. For example, a guest arriving at a hotel may require longer preparation time because of check in time and special amenities that might be delivered to the guest's room. This would not be possible with RFID capable plastic cards. This type of service can be also used for resorts, restaurants, golf courses, retailers and the like so that they may make a great first impression. Additionally, it is further desirable to ensure that the user profile data remains secure and consistent by clearing the profile data from the business owner's devices upon leaving the defined geographic area or upon receiving a defined signal. Thus, systems and methods for providing a virtual presence of a customer before arrival that can be customized for any business are defined. The inventions discussed in connection with the described embodiment address these and other deficiencies of the prior art.
The features and advantages of the present inventions will be explained in or apparent from the following description of the preferred embodiment considered together with the accompanying drawings.